Hi again! Thought I'd pop back in with a quick update. Thanks BlackSheep and Muggs for your advice/ideas. My coop is only 6'x8' and the nesting boxes are jut 18" from the pop hole, so no chance of being able to make my hens walk through lots of pine shavings on their way to the boxes. It's just been really wet here for the last month or so and everything is terribly muddy. What I have been doing to get cleaner eggs is refreshing/replacing the shavings in the nest boxes constantly and collecting eggs more often. It's been working reasonably well and the last six eggs I collected this week have been much cleaner. No more crusty poo!
My incubation is now on day 16 with my original eight grubby eggs that I rinsed off but didn't disinfect. I thought some of them maybe had blood rings in them but I was thankfully just imagining things. 6/8 were fertile and of those six, all seem to be progressing normally. Of the six cleaner eggs I collected this week, I washed and disinfected three and left the other three with the protective bloom on them. I marked them so I know which is which, and set them this morning. Mini experiment time! I know it's not exactly scientific and that to properly compare washed vs. unwashed eggs you'd have to run two separate bators, but I'm very interested to see if the original grubby eggs hatch out okay, and how they compare with the cleaner eggs, and the disinfected eggs. The staggered hatch makes things more complicated, but I'll do my best.
I shall let you know what happens...
My incubation is now on day 16 with my original eight grubby eggs that I rinsed off but didn't disinfect. I thought some of them maybe had blood rings in them but I was thankfully just imagining things. 6/8 were fertile and of those six, all seem to be progressing normally. Of the six cleaner eggs I collected this week, I washed and disinfected three and left the other three with the protective bloom on them. I marked them so I know which is which, and set them this morning. Mini experiment time! I know it's not exactly scientific and that to properly compare washed vs. unwashed eggs you'd have to run two separate bators, but I'm very interested to see if the original grubby eggs hatch out okay, and how they compare with the cleaner eggs, and the disinfected eggs. The staggered hatch makes things more complicated, but I'll do my best.
I shall let you know what happens...